At CERAWeek this year, one of the hottest topics on the agenda is arguably one of the timeliest and most pressing challenges currently faced by the energy sector: Cyber Threats.

Cyberspace has been referred to as “the Wild West” relating this modern man-made domain to the lawless western expansion of the United States in the 1800s. Today we’ve moved from hactivists and petty criminals exploiting cyberspace to nation-state recognition of its importance to national security.

Cyberspace has made our lives easier and more profitable: the ability to collaborate globally; to conduct e-commerce; to conduct the day-to-day business of international conglomerates and governments. But dependence on these same opportunities makes us vulnerable to those who would exploit the low cost of entry, near-anonymity and interconnectedness of the Internet and World Wide Web.

These threats were most recently brought to light with the release of an open source report by the tech firm Mandiant revealing a concerted effort on the part the Chinese government to conduct espionage and intellectual theft, among other allegations, globally. The report lifts a veil of secrecy on the topic and comes on the heels of an Obama administration executive order entitled “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity” which was released on February 12th.

So the threat is real and has very real implications for the energy sector. Computer based industrial systems that control pipelines and the electric grid are currently under attack in cyberspace. Cyber espionage attacks on the US energy sector, among others, have resulted in intellectual property theft estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. And the highly publicized attack on Saudi Aramco in August 2012…imagine the cost to your company if 30,000 computers were damaged with their hard drives wiped clean.

Add to this the fact that cyberspace inextricably links the private and public sector, from individual to nation-state to international corporation and the we often find ourselves faced with “wicked problems”…those problems where there may not be a best solution, but where it is critical to apply the least-worst solution.

Cyberspace is not a fad. It will not go away. It will become increasingly fast, computational data will continue to increase in size and complexity, and we will continue to be more interconnected and dependent on it.

This article was published by S&P Global Commodity Insights and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.